Chad Harbach: The Brightness w/ Madeline Cash

From the bestselling author of literary sensation The Art of Fielding comes an urgent, deeply felt story of friendship, art, love, and grief

Parties and weddings, messy hookups and marred friendships, art and love and grief—The Brightness follows the electric, chaotic, everything-can-happen lives of Pella and her best friend, Irma, as they fumble their way out of sleepy, Midwestern Westish College and into a larger world that will upend their connection and everything they thought they understood about their own place within it.

“A good book is propulsive, you can’t put it down, etc. A really good book fosters scarcity and you want to put it down as frequently as you can to live in the narrative longer. But a great book makes you feel a sort of frustration with the author that they wrote it before you. This is a good, really good, and great book. It captures a. what it was like to be a girl in college in 2016, which I was but imagine Chad wasn’t, which makes it all the more impressive, b. the complicated nature of female friendship, and c. the wonderful excruciating confusion of growing up. I could not put it down, except when I had to in order to savor it."—Madeline Cash, author of Lost Lambs

Chad Harbach is the author of the bestselling novel The Art of Fielding, which has been translated into more than twenty languages, and a founder of n+1. He was raised in Racine, Wisconsin, and educated at Harvard and the University of Virginia. He lives in Northern California with his son Ansel, and their dog, Curtis.